


so exquisite, these corpses

by merryghoul



Series: Spook Me Ficathon [8]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Character Turned Into Vampire, F/F, Vampire Bites, Vampire Slayer(s), Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-26
Updated: 2018-10-26
Packaged: 2019-08-08 01:18:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16419674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryghoul/pseuds/merryghoul
Summary: The vampire hunter knew it’d come to this.  But he didn’t think it would be like this.





	so exquisite, these corpses

The vampire hunter awoke to find himself alive, breathing, still warm. The vampire knew what she was doing. He found himself strapped to a restraint bed, his shoes off his feet. _I knew it’d come to this,_ the vampire hunter thought to himself. _Whatever happens, I am ready to face the consequences, and never see my brothers again._ “His brothers” meaning the guild of vampire hunters he worked with, dedicated to protecting the city from turning into something out of _28 Days Later_ or _The Strain._

The vampire, wearing a black hood that covered her face, walked over to him. A scarf was around her neck. The vampire hunter assumed the scarf covered where whoever turned her bit her. Maybe she was ashamed of it, he thought. As she should be.

“Do you know why you’re here?” The vampire’s words stunned the vampire hunter more than her presence. The voice was deep, gravely, unfitting of a woman of her height; she was on the tall end of petite, so he assumed. The voice cleared her throat and removed her hood. “Do you know why you’re here?”

The vampire hunter knew who the vampire was from her voice, the one that wasn’t changed. The loose black curls and the dark brown eyes confirmed the vampire’s identity. He felt a fear he’d never felt before. Not because they met in a duel and he lost. Not because he failed at saving her from a vampire. No, the last time they saw each other, she was human, and she dumped him because of his lifestyle. He called her Belle. She was once her girlfriend.

“Who turned you?” His voice echoed around the room.

“My girlfriend,” Belle said, a hiss behind her words. “The same girlfriend you tried to kill.”

Another person walked towards the vampire hunter. One dark brown eye, one eye that was blind. Blisters around the left side of her face. A patch of her black Afro missing from her head. _This was Belle’s girlfriend,_ all right, the vampire hunter thought. _And I’m fucked._

 

The vampire hunter’s relationship with Belle ended over pizza and _Blade._. The pizza was a “Hawaiian” pizza—cheese, ham, and pepperoni with three cheeses. Blade, however, found the vampire delighting too much in Blade’s kills. He wanted to be more like the movie’s Abraham Whistler when he grew up and old. This was Belle’s breaking point. “I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore,” she said, putting down a half-eaten slice of pizza. It looked like she was relieved she found a reason to stop eating pizza.

“What, Hawaiian pizza?” the vampire hunter asked.

“No, not pizza.”

“ _Blade?_ What do you want to watch again? Maybe there’s something on TCM or FX Movies…”

“No, not movies.”

“Then what?”

“This,” Belle said, waving her hands in a circle. “I can’t be in a relationship with you.”

“Why? What’d I do?”

“You just...” Belle’s voice trailed off. “You’re just too gleeful about wanting to kill vampires.”

“But that’s what I do, babe. I slay vampires. I make the herbs that burn their skin, I sharpen the stakes that I pierce into their hearts.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. Even Blade’s not killing vampires to get off on it.”

“Yes, he is.”

“Are you even watching this silly movie? Blade is not getting off on killing vampires.” Belle inhaled, and it was sharp. “I just...you need to go.”

“But we have three-fourths of the box of pizza to go.”

“Just go. I can’t take this.”

“Do you want to watch something on Lifetime…”

“Go. Now.”

The vampire hunter grabbed what he brought to Belle’s apartment and left.

 

“No, I don’t know why I’m here, babe,” the vampire hunter said to Belle.

“Yes, you do. And stop calling me babe.”

“Am I here to make amends?”

“You tell me. Why the hell am I a vampire? Why is Paul scarred up?”

“Why haven’t you killed me yet?”

“You haven’t suffered yet.”

“Yes, yes I have.”

“I mean, I could kill you right now. I have every right to, and I’m going to get away with it because you’re a vampire hunter, I’m a vampire, and deaths by vampire is one of your job hazards. No. I’m going to do what the super-villains do and give you a long speech on how Paul and I ended up this way.”

 

Belle met Paul, so she says, shortly after she broke up with the vampire hunter. It was a sunny day at the library closest to Belle’s, and Paul was holed up at a small table with a computer and her phone with headphone dongles on. Belle didn’t know it, but Paul was in the library because her powers were weak. The library was the best place for Paul to recharge before going to her next location. Paul was on Instagram, watching some stories without pausing.

“I saw that story.” Belle whispered close to Paul’s ear, shifting the novel she had in her right hand to her left.

“You’re a big fan of her?” Paul asked. She was stunned; she thought no one cared about her watching Instagram stories the way no one cared about people spending fifteen minutes on World Star Hip Hop on the public internet computers.

“Have been, ever since her first album.”

“What do you think she’s trying to say here? I mean, it’s not one of those stupid promotional graphics for Spotify or Apple Music.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I find myself going to gossip forums to try to find out, but I feel like the forum comments eat my brain. Like I find myself looking for saved Instagram Stories on these forums, but I end up reading comments where half the people in the forum claim she’s straight, was dating a man, and is married.”

Paul shook her head. “The fuck? It’s obvious she isn’t straight. It’s in her music. Why would she lie about being queer?”

“I know, right?”

“Is this a sign for someone?”

Belle shrugged. “Who knows.” She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe we can figure out together?”

It was an unusual way to ask a girl out for a date, but it worked.

 

Paul was born Pauline. She started going by Paul more recently. She never liked “Pauline.” It felt the name never really fit who she was. She kept it for so long because of expectations: you wear a dress, you should go by a woman’s name. Pauline was a woman’s name, so she held on to it.

Paul grew up poor. She didn’t have a car, so she walked to and from the town she lived closest to for supplies. She walked to and from school. That’s how she met the man who turned her, some time in 1960. He had a convertible car and his headlights on one night. She couldn’t outrun him, and she knew it when she felt her attacker’s fangs in her neck.

Paul assumed her attacker wanted to leave her for dead on the road. He thought she really was dead, that her name would show up in a paragraph in some obituary and no one, except maybe her family (if she had one; she did) would care. He didn’t realize he turned Paul in his callous attempt to murder her. He didn’t realize Paul was strong enough and hungry enough to drain a vampire dry.

It was also helpful that her attacker smoked. She lit a cigarette for him and watched his corpse catch on fire on the side of the road she left his car and him on.

 

Paul’s attacker was the only person Paul killed, years ago. Her friends and lovers were sympathetic about her situation and helped her out in obtaining blood. They gave her animal blood from barbecue restaurants and butchers. Donations from blood banks. Some offered up their own bodies.

A blood donation was how the vampire hunter ran into Paul. Paul was getting blood from a butcher. She was waiting outside for the butcher to package and give her some blood. The vampire hunter ran up and threw a combination of bleach and oak shavings in Paul’s face. Paul fell to her knees. The vampire hunter pulled out an oak stake and stabbed Paul in the back.

“You thought you killed me,” Paul said, and it felt like her Southern accent was dripping off of her words.

“I know,” the vampire hunter said. His voice was hushed. I didn’t know that was where Belle worked.

Belle saw Paul dying, for lack of words, outside of her workplace. Paul had told her that if she needed to heal from injuries, only human blood would do. Not animal. Paul didn’t know why, exactly, but she needed human blood.

Belle ran back into the butcher shop. She had no idea if her work approached of her taking one of the restaurant-style chef knives with the white plastic handles outside, but she did it anyway.

“Let me save you,” Belle said, the chef knife by her side.

“You sure?”

“I don’t wanna lose you, Paul,” Belle said, pulling out the stake in Paul’s back. She flung it as far as she could, letting out a yell. “I think I know who did this to you. My ex-boyfriend.”

“He’s a dick. No better than a cop.”

“I tried to tell him that, but I don’t think he got the hint. You promise to turn me?”

“Of course.”

Belle cut Paul’s tongue with the knife, a line across the surface of her tongue. She then felt her pulse on her neck, put the chef knife on her throat, and cut her neck.

Paul followed Belle to the ground to ingest her blood and turn her.

 

“You hate me, Belle,” the vampire hunter said. “I know. No apology will satisfy you. Kill me now.”

Belle held the vampire hunter’s left wrist in her hands. “No. Not like that.” With a box cutter, she slit his forearm. Under him were tubs, to collect the blood bleeding out of his body.

The vampire hunter was so stunned by the sight of the tubs and the pain from his left forearm that he didn’t notice Belle sinking her teeth into his neck.

 

The vampire hunter woke up and knew he was turned. He sat up on the bed he was strapped on. The restraints were removed. The scars Belle had left them had closed, but were healing. A hunger filled his stomach, a hunger he dreaded.

The vampire hunter fled Belle’s residence. The sun was out, so he was hoping that, very much like Count Orlok, his skin would burn under sunlight. It didn’t.

The next thing the vampire hunter could think of was decapitation. So many ways to decapitate a human. But he had no time to try via some low-lying object in a truck by car, or self-guillotine, or a flying pane of glass. There were train tracks. He could lie on the train tracks and wait for a train. And he heard one coming.

 

The conductor of the train heard something thump when the locomotive ran over something. The train ground to a halt. But by the time people were able to check the locomotive for damage, they found nothing. But they did find a small fire, a bit of a distance from the train tracks, and two people walking towards a road.


End file.
